I was here/Meeting with the Torypress group followers and authors of the “Cult of the Individual”

What do the iconic EN57, rail obsession and good design have in common? Learn about the history of the Unity Cult during a meeting with the Torypress group.

Torypress is a group of authors and activists from Wrocław interested in design and visual culture. They form an interdisciplinary team for popularization tasks consisting of no less iconic units than EN57: Marian Misiak, Dawid Błaszczyk, Maciek Janus and Tomasz Czechowicz.

The eponymous “unit”, or model EN57, produced since 1962 in Wrocław's Pafawag, still found on the tracks today, won a special place in the domestic railway landscape. It became, on the one hand, a train disliked and considered uncomfortable, associated with the previous era. On the other hand, it has grown among an extremely diverse community of lovers to a cult position.

The authors wanted to present the fascinating history of this model and its surprising power of impact. The album Cult of Unity vividly illustrates the creation of the train and its design, but above all focuses on the people associated with it because their passion often takes a radical form. The authors spent almost 4 years traveling around Poland, conducting interviews with enthusiasts. They met railroad enthusiasts collecting data and acquiring hitherto unshared private and institutional archives. They wanted to create a book that would explore the hitherto undescribed world of extreme obsessions and sentiments and expand the boundaries of the term “passion”.

We invite all lovers of railways, good design, books, Wroclaw and interesting human stories. In fact, in the cult of the individual all these elements are contained.